Lost and Found: When Clouds Cover Your Apps

Most of us who've worked in an enterprise setting have at least one tale of the inability to locate an app running somewhere on the premises. Whether it's on a long-forgotten server under someone's desk or deep within the data center, long-lived enterprises are bound to have lost an app at one time or another.

Even today, when we're better at tracking our apps, we still encounter issues collecting information we need to make important decisions. Information such as:

1. How many people are using the app?
2. How is it performing?
3. What is its uptime?
4. Where is it?

When we mention visibility, most people immediately zero in on execution details. Performance. Uptime. Costs. But visibility also offers insights into business attributes that can help make critical decisions about the value of an app to the business. After all, if the number of users can't justify the expense, perhaps it's time to seek out a more cost-effective solution.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Before you can ask questions and find answers, first you must find the app. This is not a trivial problem, and it's made more difficult by the introduction of additional possible placement. Yes, by public cloud.

Orphaned and forgotten instances across public clouds, despite our tendencies to joke about it, is a serious business problem. The 2019 State of Cloud report estimates that organizations waste 35% of their cloud budget, in part due to lost/orphaned instances.

This is an issue for every enterprise except, perhaps, the 8% who claim they will operate ZERO apps to the public cloud (State of Application Services 2020). The other 92% need to be aware of this business risk. Most (65%) intend to see anywhere from one to fifty percent of their apps in the public cloud by the end of 2020. A strong 28% plan to park more than half their app portfolio in a public cloud. 

Considering the average enterprise employs between two and six cloud providers, that means organizations can now lose apps (and waste budget) in multiple cloud environments.

But they don't need to.

F5 Beacon is designed to eliminate enterprise blind spots that leave apps lost—especially in the cloud. To do that, it integrates with F5 and 3rd party solutions. Those integrations automatically connect and stream to cloud-based F5 Beacon the telemetry necessary to monitor, track, and report on the availability and performance of applications.  That, in turn, enables you to visualize - and track—your app landscape, even across multi-cloud deployments. 

And because Beacon is delivered as a service, you don't have to worry about losing it. It's always available and always keeping track of your apps no matter where they might live—or move in the ear future.

To learn more about F5 Beacon, or to test drive the service, visit: http://www.f5.com/products/beacon-visibility-and-analytics